Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  Taken from the cold frosty air of a Kelvinator-chilled refrigerator, they are irresistible. Think of sliced oranges, served ice-cold; of cantaloupe or grapefruit, chilled through and through; or of home-canned fruits, served cold in their rich juices. Think of the cream for your cereals cold and refreshing.

  Older methods of food preservation did not, on the whole, purport to improve food, but merely to rescue it from harm. People knew that red herrings were not as good as fresh herrings; but you’d rather have red herrings than rotten herrings. By contrast, the fridge industry claimed not just to preserve food, but to transform it.

  The reality was not always so appealing. One common complaint about fridges was that they made food taste off even when it was fresh. In 1966, a food storage expert, R. C. Hutchinson, noted that consumers believed that refrigerated foods “lose much of their flavour and acquire another taste.” From a business point of view, however, this wasn’t necessarily a problem; it was also an opportunity. Fridges gave rise to new storage products such as plastic wrap (invented in 1953 as Saran Wrap) and Tupperware (first sold in 1946). “Hear that whisper?” urged an ad of the 1950s. “That’s Tupperware’s airtight promise to keep food flavor fresh!”

  Tupperware was also promoted as a storage device for frozen foods, an aid to cramming the maximum produce into the limited space of a home freezer. By the time that Tupperware launched, frozen food was heading toward being a billion-dollar industry, though it had a slow start. American fridges of the 1930s were hopeless when it came to freezing. Frozen items had to be stored in a tiny space next to the evaporator coils, where the fridge was coldest; there was only room for a package or two of food, and ice cubes had a nasty habit of melting and fusing into a single block.

  The potential for frozen food improved dramatically with the introduction of the “two-temperature refrigerator” in 1939—the refrigerator-freezer. At last, cartons of ice cream and ice cubes could be kept entirely separate from the contents of the fridge and at a consistent subzero temperature. Another innovation was that the evaporator coils were now hidden within the refrigerator walls, which made for more even refrigeration but also got rid of the nightmare of defrosting. The household in possession of such a machine had every reason to fill it up with some of the frozen bounty now available: frozen orange juice concentrate so that the family could have “fresh” juice every morning (this was the single-most-successful commercially frozen product in postwar America, with 9 million gallons sold in 1948 to 1949); strawberries, cherries, and raspberries, so that the fruits of summer could be enjoyed even in midwinter; newfangled fish sticks; and frozen peas, courtesy of Birds Eye.

  Clarence Birdseye, who created the modern frozen-foods industry in the 1920s, liked to say that there was “nothing very remarkable about what I have done . . . the Eskimos had [frozen foods] for centuries.” This was too modest. It is true that ice had been used—and not just by the Eskimos—to preserve fish and meat long enough for it to be brought to market. But only Birdseye developed a quick-freezing technique so delicate it could be applied not just to carcasses of flesh but to tiny green peas.

  Like the United States, Russia was a country of vast distances and icy winters, which encouraged the use of freezing to preserve food. In 1844, Thomas Masters, an ice expert from Britain (a small country with mild winters), wrote of the wonders of the ice market at St. Petersburg, “containing the bodies of many thousands of animals in a state of congelation, and piled in pyramidical heaps; cows, hogs, sheep, fowl, butter, fish—all stiffened into stony rigidity.” The produce was all frozen solid. If you wished to buy anything, it would be chopped up for you “like wood.”

  Clearly, this is a very different proposition from a bag of frozen petits pois, pre-podded and on the table in five minutes. The St. Petersburg ice market was selling rugged, survivalist food, a far cry from the American housewife of a hundred years later, who took a Swanson TV dinner from the freezer and, scarcely pausing in the transition from cold to hot, transferred it to her electric oven. Clarence Birdseye’s innovation was to create frozen foods that could fit seamlessly and hygienically into twentieth-century suburban living; no ice pick required.

  Birdseye was a fur trapper who had previously worked as a biologist for the US Department of Agriculture. His invention came out of a simple observation. He and his wife, Eleanor, and their baby son, Kellogg, were on a fur-trapping mission in Labrador, in northeast Canada, on and off during 1912 to 1915. They lived in a tiny shack far from the nearest settlement. For food, they survived on fish and game, frozen in the Arctic winds. Birdseye noticed that their food—rabbit, ducks, caribou, fish—tasted better in winter than in spring and autumn. The fast-frozen winter meat tasted as good as fresh. The reason, he assumed, was that it had frozen more quickly. He also experimented with freezing green vegetables, which were only shipped very infrequently to Labrador. Birdseye found he could quickly freeze cabbages and other greens by plunging them in barrels of salt water. He even went so far as to use little Kellogg’s baby bath to aid the process.

  Traditional methods of freezing food—such as those of the St. Petersburg market—involved simply burying the food in ice or snow, where it froze slowly This encouraged large ice crystals to form and badly affected the quality of the food, damaging its cellular structure. When slow-frozen food thawed, fluids leaked out. The problem was especially pervasive with meat. In 1926, the London Times complained of the “copious” quantities of “bleeding or drip” that tended to exude from slow-frozen beef as it thawed.

  The solution was at hand. When Birdseye returned to the United States from Labrador in 1917, he had an initial investment of just $7 for an electric fan, some cakes of ice, buckets of brine, and fillets of haddock. He set to work in a corner of a New Jersey ice-cream plant, trying to “reproduce the Labrador winters” in America. By 1925, Birdseye had developed an entirely new method for quick-freezing food, using metal plates chilled in calcium chloride solution to–45°F. Packets of food were pressed between the metal belts and froze almost instantly—far more quickly than in any previous technique. At first, Birdseye used the method to freeze fish, establishing the General Seafood Corporation in 1925, the idea being that it would become the General Motors or General Electric of frozen food. In 1929, he sold his company and patents for $22 million to Goldman Sachs and the Postum Company.

  The frozen-foods business was not an instant success. Early frozen peas did not taste good. Only in 1930 was it found that peas and other vegetables needed to be blanched in hot water before they were frozen, to inactivate the enzymes that made them spoil. The unreliable quality of frozen foods contributed to the deep suspicion with which many shoppers viewed them. There was a general sense that frozen food was subpar: salvaged goods. The turning point was when Birdseye embarked on a PR campaign, renaming the produce as “frosted foods,” a name that implied icy glamour. “Frozen food” was something you would eat rather than starve. “Frosted food” was the stuff of childhood fantasy. It worked. As of 1955, the frozen-food market was worth $1.5 billion in the United States.

  Frozen foods became popular in Britain, too. Green garden peas would surely have never become such a central part of the British diet without the deep freeze. Sausage, chips, and peas; chicken, chips, and peas; pie, chips, and peas: most of the vegetable fare on a pub menu arrives courtesy of Birdseye. In 1959, sales of frozen peas overtook sales of fresh peas in the pod in Britain for the first time. The strange thing was that British shoppers eagerly purchased frozen foods, despite the fact that they had nowhere to store them. The London Times noted that this was a “handicap” for housewives who “need suddenly to enlarge a meal for extra guests when shops are closed.” Frozen-food manufacturers looked into creating after-hours frozen-food vending machines, to answer this predicament, but so far as I am aware, none were ever operational. Picture the scene: hundreds of frantic housewives queue around the block to pick up emergency supplies of frozen Chicken Kiev to deal with the sudden arrival for dinne
r of their husband’s boss. As late as 1970, the number of households with access to a freezer of any kind stood at just 3.5 percent. For the rest of the country, any frozen food purchased had to be crammed in a tiny space on top of the ice-cube tray. I remember it well: a half-eaten cardboard container of raspberry ripple ice cream, forming large ice crystals as it melded itself onto the ceiling of the fridge.

  A gulf had opened between refrigerated America and the rest of the world. It was a question of culture, as much as of the capital outlay required to purchase fridges and freezers. For a long time, Europeans actively rejected the technology of cold storage.

  The French had a word for it: “frigoriphobie,” meaning fear of fridges. Both consumers and producers at Les Halles, the main food market in Paris, held out against refrigeration. Buyers feared it would give tradesmen too much power over them: fridges would enable them to take old food and pass it off as fresh. The sellers should have welcomed the technology—after all, refrigeration gives traders a longer window in which to sell their food. Yet when the fridge was introduced to Les Halles, traders reacted as if they had been personally slighted. The fridge, they insisted, was like a mausoleum in which the true nature of a great cheese would be killed. And who is to say they were entirely wrong? A fridge-cold Brie is a dull thing compared to the oozing wonder of a Brie matured to its peak in an old-fashioned larder.

  Nor were Continental consumers eager to use refrigeration in the home. Given their patterns of food shopping, there was frankly no need. In the 1890s, American icebox manufacturers made some tentative steps into the European market, asking American consuls for information on local demand for iceboxes. The intelligence they received was not encouraging. The consuls replied that in the great cities of southern France, meat was butchered every day in winter, twice a day in summer. The majority of people went shopping for food twice a day, eating up everything they bought. For as long as women were happy to shop and cook as often as this, and for as long as sellers could provide them with the fresh produce they needed, iceboxes were surplus to requirements.

  In Britain, too, there was no rush to buy fridges. For much of the twentieth century, American visitors to Britain found that everything was the wrong temperature: cold, drafty rooms; warm beer and milk; rancid butter and sweating cheese. In 1923, an article in House and Garden noted that “refrigerators, which are a commonplace in American households, are not sufficiently known or used over here.” Given the unreliable and poisonous nature of 1920s fridges, being slow to adopt them may have been no bad thing. Yet the British antipathy to fridges was not entirely rational. Long after electric refrigerators had become safe and consistent, and long after the majority of houses were electrified, there was still a view that they were wasteful and decadent. Frigidaire noted the challenge of cracking the British market: “The hard sell was probably essential in a Britain which regarded ice as only an inconvenience of winter-time and cold drinks as an American mistake.” This fear of the excess of American appetites was a national austerity of the mind that long predated the actual austerity of wartime and its aftermath. As of 1948, just 2 percent of British households owned a fridge.

  Eventually, the British got over their aversion to cold. Fast forward to the 1990s, and the average British household owned 1.4 “cold appliances” (whether a refrigerator, a refrigerator-freezer, or a chest freezer in the garage). There was a seemingly insatiable desire for Smeg “Fabs,” retro refrigerator-freezers in pastel colors with big clunky handles, like American fridges of the 1950s. In other words, by the late 1990s, the British had just about caught up with where Americans were fridgewise in 1959.

  The design of a fridge reflects the kind of lives designers think we lead and the kind of people they think we are. In 1940, an American refrigerator salesman commented that “fifty per cent of our business is preserving women, not fruit.” Something like a push-pull door handle with three-way action was important because “it makes a lot of difference to the woman whether she can walk with her arms full of something.” Fridges sold themselves to women based on desire—dreamy pastel colors—but also on duty: customers were told that it was their job to keep the family’s food safely cold.

  By the mid-1930s, more fridge compartments were added—removable split shelving, vegetable hydrators—encouraging households to keep a higher percentage of their food refrigerated. In all of this, the original purpose of cold storage, to keep food in optimum condition for longer, was often lost. Fridges came, and still do, with tidy egg containers. Yet these indented trays do a worse job of protecting eggs than the cartons they are sold in, which shield eggs from picking up other odors. Moreover, in a cool climate, eggs are better stored out of the fridge, at least if you use them up quickly. A room-temperature yolk is less likely to break when you fry it; and not so liable to make cake batter curdle. But your room temperature may not be the same as mine. In America, unrefrigerated eggs are viewed as hazardous objects; and so they are, in the hotter states during the warmest months. A 2007 study from Japan found that when salmonella-infected eggs were stored at 50°F over six weeks, there was no growth in the bacteria. Even at 68°F, there was negligible bacterial growth. At temperatures of 77°F and above, however, salmonella growth was rampant. In Alabama, in July, an unrefrigerated egg could be lethal.

  The internal dimensions of the fridge continue to evolve. In the 1990s, the internal shelving in British refrigerator-freezers tended to be boxy and geometrical, reflecting the fact that large sectors of the population were living off neat rectangular boxes of precooked meals. In recent years, an appliance expert told me, this has changed. People want multiple vegetable and salad crispers and more varied shelving, a reflection of the fact that they are returning to “scratch cooking” (which is “cooking” to you or me). Internal wine racks have also become common.

  Refrigerators started as devices for helping us to feed ourselves safely. Yet they have become insatiable boxes, which themselves demand to be fed. Many foods now considered staples principally came into being in order to give people something to put in their new fridges. I don’t just mean the obvious things, like fish fingers and frozen French fries. Take yogurt. Before World War II, yogurt was hardly eaten in the West. Although a traditional food in India and the Middle East, where it was made fresh as needed and kept in a coolish place, fermenting and clotting over time, yogurt had zero commercial potential in Britain or the United States. Without fridges, people consumed their dairy desserts mostly in the form of homemade milk puddings, made fresh and served warm: rice pudding, sago, tapioca (which British schoolchildren referred to as frog spawn, on account of its texture). From the 1950s onward, consumption of milk puddings fell dramatically year after year. Meanwhile, yogurt was growing into a multi-billion-dollar global industry. Why? You could say tastes had changed, but this still doesn’t explain why warm rice pudding with a dollop of strawberry jam should suddenly be spurned and why cold strawberry yogurts in plastic containers should suddenly be embraced.

  So much of what we think of as personal taste is actually a consequence of technological change. Yogurt manufacturers were capitalizing on the fact that, having bought a shiny new fridge, the owners wanted plenty of things to put in them. Those neat little pots looked good lined up on the split shelving; how they tasted was almost irrelevant (some yogurts were nice enough, but many were blander and more sugary than the traditional puddings they replaced). For the first time in history, almost everyone had access to ice all year round. Sometimes we just didn’t know what to do with it.

  Molds

  MRS. MARSHALL SOLD ICE-CREAM MOLDS shaped like apples, pears, peaches, pineapples, bunches of grapes, towers of cherries, giant strawberries, ducks, hens, swans, and fish, as well as the more abstract bombes, domes, and pillars. Her molds came in affordable pewter or tin, or best-quality copper for jellies.

  Molding something is a way of imposing your will on ingredients with great force. The shapes of food molds are culinary technology at its most capricious. By
what logic did the Indian ice cream, kulfi, that dense confection of cooked milk, come to be made in cone-shaped molds? Why not square? Or hexagonal? No one seems to know. The answer is always: “It is traditional.”

  Some food molds follow a certain logic: fish mousse goes into fish-shaped molds and melon-flavored ice might be packed into a cantaloupe mold. Often, however, there is no sense behind the shape, except for the taste and mores of the times. The Turk’s head was a popular patisserie mold in the early twentieth century, mimicking a turban; it’s a pretty shape, but the idea behind it—eating a Turkish man’s head—seems in very poor taste now.

  Molds are driven by fantasy and a desire for the spectacular, and our sense of spectacle changes over time. Medieval gingerbread molds, hand carved from wood, might depict harts and does, wild boars and saints. The stock of images available to us now is far larger; but our imaginations are often smaller. In kitchen shops today, you can buy a large cake mold resembling a giant cupcake.

  8

  KITCHEN

  I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization

  that while we can and do measure the

  temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we

  don’t know what goes on inside our soufflés.

  NICHOLAS KURTI, 1968

  IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, DESIGNERS liked to joke that a house was just a kitchen with a few rooms attached. In 2007, before the Great Recession, the New York Times identified a new cultural malaise: professionals suffering from “post-renovation depression” when their kitchen project is finally done and they have to stop obsessing over the minutiae of faucets and backsplashes. “People said it would be a great relief when it was over,” commented one homeowner whose elaborate kitchen refit nearly doubled the size of her house. When the room was finished, she complained, it “left a huge hole in my life.” Such unhappiness might seem strange to the Victorian housemaid embarking on the wearying daily chore of cleaning and blacking a cast-iron stove. The expensive kitchens of the present speak of a degree of comfort, particularly for women, that is historically unprecedented. The technology of the kitchen is both cause and consequence of that comfort. Our lives are comfortable because we have upscale fridges and toasters. We buy the fridges and the toasters to fit with our comfortable lives.